


Stories at Bedtime

by LelithSugar



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bedside Vigils, Drama & Romance, Getting Together, Idiots in Love, Internalized Homophobia, Love Confessions, M/M, Mild Peril, Mutual Pining, Pining, Romance, and all that good stuff, some actual spy stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-05-12
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:22:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24045853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LelithSugar/pseuds/LelithSugar
Summary: Life gives Harry Hart another chance to learn his lesson: never let the sun go down on an argument.
Relationships: Harry Hart | Galahad/Gary "Eggsy" Unwin
Comments: 95
Kudos: 157





	1. The First Story

**Author's Note:**

> Now Look (tm): this has been sitting in my drafts for several years, so there may be some bits that have since been cannibalised for other works. I didn't post it for two major reasons.  
> Firstly, the version of Harry and Eggsy's relationship that I usually write all sit on one timeline in my mind and this is not part of it, so to me it's almost like an AU to *my* universe. But If you regularly read my PWPs you may have your own feelings as to whether this or your Starter For Ten fits better as a starting point.  
> Secondly it's trope-y and cheese-y as all hell and been done a hundred times. But these are dark days and if this entertains anybody for a few minutes it was worth dusting off, so please enjoy!

Stories at Bedtime 

Chapter one

The first story Harry told was to himself. 

He told it to everyone else who asked, too, and in fairness it was less a story than an out and out lie, but a white lie, with good intentions. 

_ I am not in love with Eggsy Unwin.  _

There was some hope initially that perhaps if he said it often enough, thought it often enough, he could make it true, but that was less a priority than persuading meddling friends to leave him alone when he'd just about managed to screw his determination to the sticking place and rule it out, once and for all. It was neither fair nor kind, the way they kept waving it under his nose. Merlin, in particular, was keen on occasionally pulling him aside for excruciating pep talks every time Harry so much as allowed himself within three metres of the boy. 

“ _ We were running a sweepstake on when you two would get together, before you… before. Don't let this get in the way of something that's going to make you happy.” _

_ Before.  _ Before he'd died? Before he'd spent four months in lonely padded purgatory, blissfully ignorant of the carnage at home, of the monster he’d been? Before he was horribly disfigured? Before he'd returned, weak and handicapped, to find the boy who's heart he'd broken twice accidentally living in his house, and broken it on purpose? No, because they don't know that story. It's none of their bloody business. 

_ “It would have been a terrible idea then, and it's a worse one now. Honestly Merlin I expected better of you than gossiping." _

_ “Come off it, Harry. I'm only trying to help. Love isn't a weakness.” _

_ “The fuck it isn't.” _

It didn't matter what the others thought or said, because Harry had made his mind up, and he knew he was right because it hurt, and that's what life does. He'd learned years ago that happiness was a mirage, a glistening dream held together only by its own surface tension. It was a lie, a fable: pleasant enough as a diversion, but anything you built on it would crumble around your ears. As fatalistic as it sounded even to himself, some level of pain was normal. It was how you knew you were alive, that you were in the real world. It was safe.

And it had been going reasonably well. 

Fine, in fact,  save for a few delicious moments of tension which Harry had resigned to file away, to be called back only in his very weakest moments: his little reward for maintaining his resolve. The taste of fantasy of what might have been, without it ever being tainted by the disappointment of reality. In his very very worst hours, Harry caught himself wistfully thinking Eggsy might remember it the same way one day, when he's married with two children and a summer residence in Florence: the thing that never quite was between them, how it might have gone, whether it would have felt like it felt like it was going to, with the currents running between them. Whether some tiny, quiet part of him would always want it. 

Because he did want it. Harry is only half blind and not stupid. The searing, horrid beauty of the matter is that he was always absolutely aware of the way Eggsy hung on his words, starry-eyed; how he glowed under his praise and strived to please him. One word, one moment of weakness, and that boy would've been in Harry’s arms, in Harry’s bed.

Almost had been.

It could have been anything. It could have been t he blessed bloody relief of his friends being alive when he'd already had to mourn them; of Harry himself being alive when the poor boy had spent months grieving for him, unmoored in his new life.  No wonder he'd had something of a fit of pique, bundled up all his fear and his feelings and thrown them at the nearest obviously _oh so willing_ recipient in the form of a beautifully earnest, clumsy, flattering pass at Harry. A nd of course the gentlemanly thing was to be kind to him through it, to patiently wait it out and help him pick up the pieces once he'd calmed down, just like they were doing with everything else.

“...But there’s just… something, some  _ thing I _ hoped I'd feel when I found the person I want to be with, and that weren't there with her.” Harry'd murmured and nodded, done all the polite listening even whilst the cold prickle of an instinct proven right broke out in the back of his chest like a fever sweat. If he'd not been so dismissive of his own daydreaming, he'd have see this coming. He'd have protected himself.  “I think I feel it with you. Like, I know the rest of it ain't there yet but I've seen the way you look at me. I've got a feeling I can make you happy, and I know I want to. “   


It was the easiest decision he'd ever made. With Eggsy smiling wine-soft up at him, hazy and unreal.

“Are you just gonna let me talk myself into fucking oblivion, or are you gonna say something? You can kiss me if you don't know what to say.”

Harry allowed himself the briefest moment to admire the beauty of the butterfly of his hope before piloting it straight into the flame. 

“No, Eggsy.” Knowing what a loyal puppy looks like when you have a gun trained squarely on its forehead had become a surprisingly apt frame of reference.  It came out the way you tell a child not to spend all his pocket money on sweets and Harry hated himself for it, but he was adequately punished by the ache in his chest. All right. All correct, somehow, the crushing pain of having to hurt the boy he loves, because it's for the best. Quick, final. Like ripping off a plaster. Like lopping your fucking arm off at the elbow because your hand is trapped: needs must.

“Are you telling me you don't feel it? That you don't… want me, or fancy me, or love me, or anything on that spectrum?”  _ Don't cry, Eggsy. If you cry we will be lost. " _ You telling me I've got this completely wrong?”

“That's exactly what I'm telling you.” 

In Harry's defence, he never said it was true. He could have given the real reasons, of course: that he was frightened; that Eggsy could do better and the problem was not that fact but that he would realise it one day; that the part of Harry giving any quarter to thoughts of building a life at home had sealed off the day he'd ended up covered in bits of Eggsy's father. But Eggsy would have had an answer for them all, would have given him some dazzling wet-eyed speech about how that's what made it all worth it, and Harry would have believed him, and he couldn't allow that. But Eggsy would not allow him to martyr so painlessly, either.

“Kiss me,” he'd demanded. Dared. There was a coldness to his voice that could have frozen Harry brittle. 

“Have we not just-”

“Nah, I don't believe you. Come on.” He hadn't anticipated such a fight for it. Should have, but didn't. Should've known Eggsy was braver than he'd ever be; brow creased, his eyes hard with the challenge. “If i t ain't nothing, kiss me and walk away.”

There would be no literal walking from his own living room but there was nothing for it. To refuse would have been as much as admitting defeat, and the better this was nipped in the bud the less they'd have to endure any lingering uncertainty, anything as ugly as hope. Far kinder to give Eggsy back to the life he belonged to now, whatever sacrifice that took.

...and at least when Harry died he would do so at least knowing that he had kissed him.

So he did. Once; firmly but not dismissively on the mouth; the slightest parting of lips to share one breath, to allow that one touch of wet warmth that would apparently prove the point so when Harry pulled back, so carefully neutral, Eggsy would accept the rejection on his word.

But oh, not gracefully. His tears that time were of disbelief and fury, unchecked and wild, and how beautiful he was. It might be enough one day, Harry supposed, to know that somebody - and not just somebody but Eggsy, his darling Eggsy - had looked that way about him, just once. Shaking his head and going to speak again but choking on it; shoving his shoes on without looking at them , eyes full of betrayal before Eggsy had turned his back, let himself out into the night, and that had been that.

With the release of having so soundly pushed Eggsy away came relief.  It was rewarding, in a strange way, to pour too much brandy and sink into the pain and grief that had eluded Harry for years, channeled into mourning for the fairytale love he knew reality would never have let him have, and why should it, after all he's done?

Eggsy was too good for the likes of him . Harry couldn't fix the past year, or in fact the twenty before it. He couldn't erase the trauma of Eggsy's upbringing or give him his childhood on new terms, but he could stop him throwing his future away on an understandable but misplaced crush. For goodness sake, Harry would be eligible to draw a state pension before Eggsy even reached middle age; he's heartbreakingly past his prime  _ now _ as hard as he fights to keep on top of the game, and Eggsy is less than half his age, and well he might be in the throes of admiration now for reasons Harry has a horrible suspicion relate to his having grown up without a father figure, and very well that may translate into attraction but that can't last. 

And so what if it does? If Eggsy did love him? If Eggsy would somehow be blind to Harry spending the best years of his life crumbling away before his eyes? Illness and death. Eggsy has outlived Harry once, as a friend, and look what it's done to him. The idea of them growing unevenly older and Eggsy being left… widowed, or whatever the appropriate term was, was what had really steeled his resolve: he couldn't do that to him. 

It had been the right thing. Harry knew it was the right thing, to spare him any of that.

But it seems absurd now, when there he is, relatively hale but for the wounded heart, sitting watch by Eggsy's deathbed at twenty five.


	2. Chapter Two:

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all the wonderful engagement on the first chapter. I promised I wouldn't keep you waiting long!

The story of how he came to be there is a typical one, in their line of work: action packed and selfless.

Harry considered it a mercy, at first, that they'd not had to meet again until they'd been bundled onto a plane and dropped hot into an active mission.

Of course Eggsy looked devastating in full suit but it puts it back into context: he's an agent, an incredible man doing life saving work, making his sprint across the open after delivering the last civilians to safety. A job well done.

There's a barely perceptible noise, and Eggsy jolts. 

He looks to Harry, wide eyed and helpless, and when he tries to speak, blood spills over his bottom lip instead of words. He's still looking at it on his hands, confused and horrified, when his eyes roll back and he drops like a sack of potatoes. Harry tries not to think about whether that gurgle was pain or liquid in his lungs: neither is good, one would be much, much worse.

“Eggsy, I'm here." What difference would that make? Why would Harry expect that to be a comfort to him now? "Stay with us." 

The poison was venom-derived, unrefined but brutally effective. It had incapacitated Eggsy mere seconds after the dart had hit him and taken its horrible bloody time making its agonies known in each part of his body. On the bright side, its slow progress had afforded them the crucial minutes needed to intervene with the adrenaline and every antivenom in the kit, fistsfulls of syringes at a time because no side effect they could possibly have would be worse than the otherwise obviously inevitable death. By the time one had started working - and there was still some debate as to which, or which combination, had started to reverse the effects - the drawbacks of the crudeness of the formula were evident in the purple mottling of Eggsy’s skin, the curl of his fingers and toes where his body was wrenched with pain spasms. 

Harry had flapped about, humiliatingly useless, until Roxy had got Eggsy sedated and into the med bed and the horrific strangled gurgling noise he’d been making trying not to scream had abated into heavy, laboured breathing. His rush back to his side then, to hold his clawed up hand and whisper comforting nonsense with no real idea as to whether Eggsy could hear him or not, had felt like the too little too late that it was.

At home they intubated and ran the basic tests before deciding that the most reasonable course of action was to induce a coma whilst Eggsy weathered the damage the toxin had started doing the moment it forced its way into his tissues, and the trauma of all the treatments to reverse it since. The attempts were all pioneering, which was to say that some were entirely untested and all the work that had been done was on function rather than finesse: none were pretty, nor painless. 

The second day, Eggsy flatlined and had to be resuscitated.

Harry made peace, in those endless few seconds, with the fact that nothing would ever be right or real again. Eggsy had told him all about watching him ‘die’, and just as he’d been a laptop removed there was Harry, ushered to the other side of a glass partition to instantaneously adjust to the idea of a life that didn’t Have Eggsy in it, not just because he’d pushed him away but because he was no longer there at all. 

The impossibility became possible the moment Eggsy’s heart failed to respond to the first shock from the defibrilator pads and Harry, somehow, continued to exist. Left to contemplate the possibility that averting that disaster once did not by any means indicate they were out of the woods, and next time he might really be gone, and what would be left then? What would life be for? Harry may in fact coast along on sheer numbness and become the perfect agent: devoid of any conscience, empathy or self preservation because if he allows himself to feel a damn thing he can't imagine how he'll possibly survive himself. Maybe that would be for the best. 

But they got Eggsy stable again, and in the abrupt quiet, Harry was able to resume his post by his bedside, and so he sits. 

“You've done very little other than cause me pain for nineteen years now, Gary Unwin, and I'm afraid it's doing nothing to deter me from being hopelessly in love with you.” It helps, somehow, to say the words out loud, even if it's the only time he ever will. 

By the time Eggsy’s two weeks deep in an induced coma, Harry has taken to monologuing at his unconscious form just to fill the silence. Harry would actually be grateful for all the bleeps and ticks and flashes of a true Hollywood intensive care unit but he knows it’s all bullshit from his own experiences. It’s a comfort, when it’s you lying there occasionally floating into semi-awareness of your surroundings, not to have electronics shrieking at you from every angle, but it robs the watchers of that reassurance that all is well, or if not well then at least not in immediate crisis, that there are no beeps and only one bloody wiggly line, pale green on a dark green background. Harry is only too happy to watch that line spike and fall rhythmically, having seen it fall still once. It gives him something to focus his eyes on rather than the wires and the tubes. So many tubes. Slender IV lines into the backs on his hands and the crook of his elbow. The PEG line pumping pre-digested food right into his stomach. Catheters, drips and autosyringes. And the fucking corrugated tube of the ventilator, stuffed into his mouth, suffocating him with artificial breath so that there’s not so much as the uneven softness of his natural breathing that could allow Harry to fool himself that Eggsy is merely asleep. 

Harry talks to him as though he is sleeping. Each shift he takes by Eggsy’s bedside - and he makes no effort to pretend he doesn't takes more than anyone else, perhaps everyone else put together, or give any explanation for why that might be - begins with pleasantries, passing the time of day as though he expects a response. During the day when others come and go he regails Eggsy’s unhearing ears with tales of missions gone humorously awry: some only funny with the benefit of a decade or two’s hindsight, some minor mishap that’s just happened each day even if it’s only the time Merlin knocked a coffee over an explosive postage stamp and blew a desk through the ceiling. 

At night, when he’s in less danger of being interrupted, he tells Eggsy different stories altogether. Harry spills out all his loss and fear like his audience is a counselor he’s pa ying hundreds an hour for rather than his unconscious… fuck, he doesn’t even know what to refer to Eggsy as now. Some would say protege, although it’s so much less linear than that now. He doesn’t feel he deserves ‘friend’, not how things were left, and to think that he might have been able to call him his lover or partner if he weren’t such a sterling silver fucking idiot is just too much for him to process. 

Because of course Harry loves him. And each tale of distress, each excuse - because he accepts now, by Eggsy’s perpetually silent bedside, that that is what they are - sounds more glib and pathetic even to his own ears. He's just afraid. He's a coward. Given the constant immediacy of their mortality, it’s hard to imagine how he ever thought issues like age and opinions were important when ignoring them might have meant he had just one happy day with this boy in his arms the way he refused to acknowledge he’d been picturing. He pours it all out now, stopping well short of intimate detail but allowing him all the truth of his own thoughts. 

In his dreams, Eggsy cracks an eye and makes a pithy remark, having been awake for the duration of some humiliating confession or other. Harry makes enough of those to significantly raise the statistical likelihood, tempting fate, but it still doesn’t happen. The machines do not beep, and Eggsy does not stir. 

Of course, all the time Eggsy is unconscious the situation is suspended, trapped in a Schrodinger's Box of possibility. Harry is neither tormentedly stoic nor having to pine whilst Eggsy does exactly what he's told him to, pretending he isn't heartbroken because it's for the best. He's just waiting. He drinks too much, he works too much, he spends too much time sitting by Eggsy’s bedside but nobody stops him because the hypnotic flick of the heart monitor and the flagellation of the barely padded chair in front of it seem to be all that will actually persuade Harry to sleep.

Of course, when Harry’s awake it's a different story altogether. There's a point at about eleven o'clock each morning at which he has a change of heart and decides that the course he'd already decided on was the best one; that when Eggsy wakes it will be best to step back and watch him move on; to maintain his stiff upper lip and never again mention any... _ any of it.  _ And then he remembers it’s an ‘if’ not a ‘when’. The constant yoyoing is exhausting, and he feels like nothing quite so much as an old dish rag being stung out of every drop of grubby, dull soap water. 

He catches himself thinking that it might actually have been easier if Eggsy had died. That at least then Harry would have a hook on which to hang the hat of his bone deep sadness, a justification for his torment and misery. The story would be ended in tragedy, but the sort of quick, unjust and dramatic sort that was bittersweet but somehow satisfying in its entirety. He'd spend the rest of his life mourning secret love rather than watching its ghost live the life he has refused himself. 

He forces himself to do seventeen laps of the course at headquarters in penance for the thought: one for each day that Eggsy has been sleeping, and almost does himself in in the process. 

Sleeping is the word he uses. Eggsy is just resting, repairing, maybe even dreaming. Harry refuses to let himself think of him being lost in the void of suspended consciousness and unable to find his way back, aware but paralyzed. 

When they take the tubes out and reduce the sedation, crossing their fingers and counting on his body waking him up when it's ready. Could be a day or two, or a week, or months. Nobody says never, but there's no end on the sentence. Harry plays the optimist: buys Eggsy some actual proper pyjamas although he leaves changing him into them to a nurse, logistically because he has no idea how to navigate the web of tubing and circuitry that they're reducing day by day, holding collective breath to see if Eggsy's body will step up and resume the tasks that have been done for it. 

So far, so good. Once Eggsy is down to just nasal tubes for oxygen, they allow Harry to shave him, which again feels distressingly intimate. Could they have had this? Harry entertains a fleeting, self indulgent and masochistic fantasy of the domesticity they might have had if he weren’t such an indescribable self obsessed, martyring pillock and it's like salt on a wound, satisfying in its absolute agony. 

One word, and for a time at least he might have been able to enjoy that. Even if it wasn't forever. Even if it petered out or crashed and burned, surely there was no version that could have felt worse than watching the tone drop out of his muscle as he lay motionless, day after day.

Chance would be a fine thing, to be dumped by Eggsy now.

“You're a lazy bugger, Eggsy. What do I have to do to tempt you out of your lie in? Your mother said a bacon sandwich did the trick when you were at home.” 

Doctors begin to quietly, haltingly offer answers to questions nobody is asking about why he’s not showing any signs of regaining consciousness now that there’s nothing stopping him. When they mention amnesia Harry has another one of the lurches of self-absorbed horridness that makes him want to smash the glass he’s drinking from and stab out his remaining eyeball: it occurs to him briefly that if he had amnaesia he could pull a _While You Were Sleeping_ on him, create him a whole new set of retrospective memories in which they are love’s young dream and only hope not to get scuppered by Sandra Bullock’s charming ineptitude or, closer to home, someone threatening to shoot one of their dogs. Let them go forward in an alternate universe in which the Harry Hart the boy fell for is not an emotionally stunted coward and responded to that first confession by sweeping him off his feet. The way he should have done.

They rattle off other possibilities that he was under the impression they’d ruled out: paralysis, sensory impairment, permanent cognitive changes. Harry chooses optimism once again, and opts to believe that the swelling on his brain is just protecting the real Eggsy in there like bubble wrap, safe and sound, keeping him insulated from the world until he’s ready to face it. Until he comes round and has to look Harry in the eye, work beside him and carry on as though he didn't very bravely confess his feelings to the man only to have them thrown back in his face. Harry has never deserved him. 

Harry bargains with deities he's never believed in. Any of them, all of them, whoever is listening: if Eggsy pulls through this he’ll do whatever they ask. He’ll bite the bullet and tell him how he feels and not waste another fucking second on but and what if. 

The last promise is barely mumbled into a polystyrene cafeteria cup when the universe rather spectacularly calls Harry's bluff. 

Eggsy opens his eyes, and the world changes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you're still enjoying! Please do let me know if you are. Last chapter up in a day or two. xx


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for sticking with it!

There's a brief flutter of machinery as Eggsy panics himself to alertness and then he's surrounded by medical professionals; his hand is still in Harry's, for a second, and he gives him a little squeeze before they usher Harry out of the room and get to work on him.

When Harry is allowed back in, four hours twenty six minutes later, Eggsy has been propped up in bed. He looks strangely soft, well-rested, his freshly washed hair fluffy although he’s not changed out of his new pyjamas, which he greets Harry with thanks for. Some form of it, at least. 

“I ‘spose I've got you to thank for the fact I look like a fucking toothpaste advert?”

And just like that, the resolve is lost. 

It would have been settled for them if Eggsy had woken up whilst Harry was in one of his three AM crying jags - words of love and hopeful promises already half way out of his mouth - but he woke into ordinary silence over a cup of appalling tea in the middle of an evening. “ _ Oh, nice to have you back with us. By the way you were right, I am quite madly in love with you, would you like to move into my house and let me worship your body and move into your mind, and we can grow sweetpeas and co parent a brood of irritating terriers _ ?” It just... cannot be. Not now. 

Then, after the rush of vitals checks and advice and medication comes almost normality. They're just Kingsman agents living a reasonably typical series of events, they could almost forget the rest ever happened. But it's telling, perhaps, that nobody attempts to question Harry being the first person that's afforded an audience with newly awake Eggsy.

“Do you remember…?”

“Yeah, I do. Remember everything.” He says it pointedly, with a little nod, not rude but assertive:  _ you don't need to break my heart again, Harry, it's alright. _

Harry says nothing, even whilst ice stabs trough his stomach, because perhaps this is his sign that things really are right left as they are? At least for a while, to see how they pan out. Eggsy doesn't need all the emotional upheaval on top of his physical recovery, and if he's taken Harry's rebuff to heart and processed it, the hardest part is already over. It would be cruel and senseless to introduce doubt now. It's all so confusing, and amidst the chaos of visiting and recovery and getting back to some semblance of normality, Harry can't make head nor tail of his thoughts or his feelings and that's certainly not the time to start blurting them at their subjects.

It continues much the same for another week: with Harry saying nothing, wondering why it doesn't get any easier, aching every time Eggsy smiles at him, muted in a way Harry wishes he didn't know was nothing to do with his health. And oh, wouldn't he give anything to put that smile back how it should be?

...Except, apparently, for the one thing he knows they both want?

_ Holy hell. What have I done? _

Of all things, it comes to a head after he gets the bollocking to end all bollockings for smuggling JB into the ward, which says it all, because they shriek at him about whether Harry would risk the health of everyone in the organisation just to make Eggsy happy for five minutes as If they expect the answer to be _no_. 

He's going to tell him.

It bubbles up like a giggle from his chest to his head. Like he's drunk. It's different this time, to the hundreds of other lurches, and he doesn't know how, but he knows it.

Life takes on an absurdly dreamlike, dizzy mantle as the day goes on, like reality has simply suspended itself awaiting this fork in the path. He's privately sure that for all his determination, the time will come and find him a coward again, as it has every time, hiding behind the status quo; that this time tomorrow the world will be no different. That he will o nce again have chosen normal misery over the impossible fantasy...

Oh, but if he does? 

"Eggsy, can we have a talk? Before we go home?"

Mid packing his last few things into a bag, Eggsy doesn't seem to catch the ambiguity of who might go where, but he picks up on the gravity in Harry's voice whether he's conscious of it or not. He doesn't stop, and his tired tone almost knocks Harry off his course. 

"We can, on the train. Ain't nothing I wanna talk about that can't wait, really."

Of course, but he doesn't understand. And perhaps he's right, perhaps it could be left hanging just a little bit longer whilst Eggsy rests. But Harry can't shake the sense he shouldn't tempt the fates like that. Why should they be kind to him when he promised to seize their gifts and yet here he stands, truth thick and clumsy in his mouth, with Eggsy about to go back out into the real world and his side of the deal not upheld?

Twice he's been spared, now. 

He spins out of the door and marches after him.

“Eggsy, please.” 

Eggsy looks unwilling, angry even, but Harry reaches for him. If he has learned one thing, it's that one is never guaranteed a tomorrow - or even a _later -_ in which to set things right, and this has gone on long enough.

“ _ What _ , Harry? I swear down if you’re gonna tell me you don’t -“

“Let. Me. Speak.” The snap stuns Eggsy to stopping, to silence that’s just enough for the breath Harry’s already taken in, is already losing in a rush of words he doesn’t remember composing. “You were right, and you know you were right, and I have to get this out now before I lose my nerve." It's already going, but Harry has faced down far worse than his own cowardice, and the hope on Eggsy's face is like sunrise breaking over the horizon in his heart. "I will tell you how I feel and I will not whisper it whilst you're asleep and I will not wait until this kills us to blurt it at your corpse. I love you. I love you and it's ridiculous, and it's not right, and it's probably stupid but I do, and I should never have pushed you away, because if you feel an ounce of what you said you do that’s all that matters.” 

Eggsy simply blinks at him.  Not in disbelief that the words are true, because he knows they are, but that Harry has actually found the balls to say them. Harry would be wounded by it if he wasn't well aware, and if those wide eyes didn't flick -just an instant before a blink- to his lips. 

Now? Could it really be now?  It's happened in his head so many times that by the time they actually kiss it's somehow no surprise at all. Somebody moves and he may never know who, but Eggsy's mouth is warm and soft and so right it makes his chest ache with relief; makes Harry's brain close off to all but the sweetness of it, like he's dreaming. He’ll wake up soon, or else his whole life is an imagination, a fiction, too apt and circular to be real. No way is this a reality he deserves to be in. 

“Oh, Eggsy, I know it's silly…” he says feebly, when they draw apart. It's not a dismissal, this time, and they are not negotiating a kiss: that much is obvious. One simple kiss could be passion, could be a mistake, could be relief, fury, ecstasy, anything, but that point has passed.  All the thought has been done, the paperwork drawn up out of sight. More than a kiss now is so, so much more than a kiss. It's signing off without reading to the end, and the small print be hanged, and they both know it.

“No, it ain't.” Eggsy gives him that second kiss without a word more to clarify, and Harry barely remembers what he's arguing with. “I mean… on paper it is, it's ridiculous,” and that too does not deter either of them from another kiss when they're so close. Not when it feels like this, like it was always meant to. “But it's not. You feel it, don't you? The most obvious thing. We were made for each other, you and me.”

Harry has always felt it.

“It won't be easy…”

“Oh yeah, ‘cause saving the world four times has been a piece of piss? Dealing with you pushing me away was a right laugh.” That one hurts but there will be plenty more to come and Harry deserves every barb, and will weather them with grace. It's the least he can do now. “You're worried about what? Casual homophobes? Daily Mail readers?”

And the rest, but what did their age ever matter? If there must be an ending they can go out in a hail of bullets and ill fated heroics together, with time for a witty one liner and, if the fates are appeased now, a final kiss. It's senseless to worry about it when they've barely made it here, yet here they are, and Eggsy is so right to be thinking about the future they know they do have.

“Work will be… difficult. I'm not sure what the rules are regarding-”

“Do you know what, Harry? I couldn't give a shit. If Arthur says a fucking word we’ll break in, drop off our four weeks’ notice and bang on his desk. Fuck it. Get normal jobs. I can just see you doing the fitting rooms in Primark.”

Harry catches himself in an undignified, wondrous laugh. They've barely kissed and Eggsy would plan their retirement; talks about sex as though it's not this looming incredible terror that doesn't even bear thinking about at this second. Harry can feel the shimmering ghost of passion, of the sort of coupling that's almost too intense to be called truly pleasurable; doubtless awkward, probably over far too quickly to really process, just a necessary letting off steam before they can savour each other...  The reality that he will actually get to have Eggsy, to put his hands and his mouth on that skin, grabs at something in him so viciously he thinks for a moment that he's having a heart attack, and wouldn't that just be typical? 

No. No more Romeo and Juliet for them. No more near misses and might-have-beens.  Nothing stands between he and Eggsy now, or between them and a happily-ever-after: life's penchant for ironic cruelty, perhaps, if Harry's to be a cynic.  But what can he be cynical about? He’s never believed in fairytales, and yet one kiss speaks of the story he’d never permitted to tell himself. 

"Perhaps it won't come to that. Though we'll have to tell them..." he feels his face screw through ugly uncertainty: how is it that in all the torturous overthinking Harry wrung himself through, he managed never to consider any of the real practicalities? How to name this, how to live it? "...something. At some point."

"I'll do it." Eggsy grins, and to think: Harry had come so close to never seeing that smile again. "I'll leave out all the bits where you were a prick and I sound like a whiny dickhead and just tell them about the dashing heroics with the poison, and the bit where you came in and told me you loved me and swept me off my feet. Deal?"

"Deal," laughs Harry, giddy, blinding excitement shaking his voice.

Eggsy raises his eyebrows, looks pointedly down at his feet and then at the doorway that will take them from the medical bay into HQ proper; into the real world, into life as they know it... as they have never known it.

Harry picks him up, and carries him. It will make for a decent story, at least.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!   
> Please do drop me a line if you enjoyed. 
> 
> Normal smut service will be resuming shortly. xx

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I doubt I need to tell you how much authors crave and thrive on your feedback, so please do drop me a few words if you can. I'm a little behind on replies but I'm catching up!
> 
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